The Industrial Revolution gave the world a new idea of the ideal society. “Try sniffing the abominable stench behind the piles of books,” wrote Japanese Futurist Hirato Renkichi in 1921. “How many times superior is the fresh scent of gasoline!”

Roll down your window: see the metaphors go by. There’s Zhora the replicant, smashing through plate glass windows; there’s Jake lost in Chinatown, and Tod Hackett running through Hollywood, bloody faced, chased by a mob. “Los Angeles is probably the most mediated town in America,” writes Michael Sorkin, “nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers.”